universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

290existence acknowledged by the scientific community as it recognizes exemplars of BRsas such.7.6 Limitations and suggestions for further researchSince the nature of the questions asked in this study is eclectic and the corpusinvolves complex data with whole exemplars of the same genre across disciplines, I optedfor a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques used in acomparative/contrastive approach. This combination provided insight for at least onecentral problem in Genre Analysis, that of relating linguistic clues to rhetorical staging intext. Linguistic clues such as metadiscourse markers were found to occur in specificportions of the text, functioning as signaling devices of rhetorical sub-function in BRs.At the same time, because this study consists of a pioneering work on a genre yet notfully explored, the analysis has exposed a set of limitations which may be more accuratelytreated in future research with a more specific delimitation of the data and the variables inthe analysis. A more in-depth investigation of either contextual features, or text features,or the existing variation between these two sets of features may prove useful, in futureresearch, in producing a framework for defining moves and steps more precisely or a moreappropriate framework for studying how textual features mirror different epistemic modesacross disciplines.A second limitation has to do with the lack of sufficient and detailed empirical workof genre-analytical approaches applied to teaching ESP reading and writing in foreignuniversities classrooms that could have informed this study more properly. We still needample research on the real possibilities of Genre Analysis in EFL contexts.